HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
'HISTORICAL OVERVIEW: TOWARDS THE EXTENDED EXPERIENCE' Before the era of the digital cinema and the media convergence there were also extremely long narratives which could be seen in film theaters of TV sets, normally in more than one session. Nowadays we can regard those early examples as proto-syntagms of excess which paved the way for current narratives. Similarly, in those cases, the out-of-the-norm longitude was accompanied by an excessive emotion in the narrative, which resonated in the spectator's body in the same way as the 21st Century syntagms. Documentaries Some of the most famous examples are documentaries about the trauma of the WWII and the Jewish genocide: Marcel Ophüls' The Sorrow and the Pity grips the spectator for 4 hours and 25 minutes. The more the movie lingers the more the audience emphatically suffers with the images. Another notorious documentary that plays with the length in order to provide and experience of suffering is Claude Lanzmann's'' Shoah. Although normally is divided in parts for its screening, it was also seen in its entire longitude in film festivals and other venues. The French version of the film runs for 613 minutes, existing other shorter cuts for UK or USA. Apart from the extended structure, ''Shoah denies the exhausted spectator the images of the past, enhancing a unsettling sensation that goes along with the experience of the trauma. Fiction Films During the silent era some titles stood out for their extreme length. Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires, was released in several episodes during 1915 and 1916, and probably it is the first example of a series and at the same time a miniseries (10 episodes). Early melodrama was also a suitable genre for long narratives. David W. Griffith's third feature, Intolerance ''(1916), had different running times, but its premiere in New York, lasting for more than three hours was a complete shock for the public of the 10s. Years latter, Eric von Stroheim challenged the spectators of the twenties with a 462 minutes cut of ''Greed (1924). This 42-reel version was only seen by 12 people, including some friends and some journalist who were passionate about the film after the session, but that cut was not the one that finally went to theaters because the Metro reduced it to 140 minutes, without the consent of the director. The French filmmaker Abel Gance made also a very long version of his Napoleon (330 minutes) inaugurating one of the sub-genres which is more suitable for extended narratives, the biographical syntagm of excess. In the second half of the 20th Century, when the TV set had turned to be an indispensable appliance in every house, the extremely long films had also a second life on the little screen. War and Peace ''(1966-67) by Sergei Bondarchuk, divided in four segment which lasted from 84 to 147 minutes, was the most ambitious and the most expensive project undertook by the Soviet film industry until that time. The adaptation of the classical novel was a tremendous success and it is still now considered the best version of Tolstoy's story. In 1971, an authentic mammoth film was made by the Nouvelle Vague author Jacques Rivette: ''Out 1: Noli Me Tangere. ''The film reflected about the consequences of May 68 in the society, exemplified in a theater troupe. As ''War and Peace, it was also divided in episodes (8) for its distribution. Rivette had experimented before with long time narratives in his 1969 film, L'Amour Fou; however, the leap between the 252 to the 773 minutes of Out 1 was such a challenge. The movie that better exemplifies the exchanges between film industry and television is Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (1982). It was originally conceived as a four-part TV movie with a running time of 312 minutes but before it was aired, a 3 hours version was made for cinematic release. Both, the 5-hour cut and the 3-hours cut circulated around commercial theaters or festivals, making the distinction between film and TV problematic. A more recent example, which approaches us to the present of syntagms of excess, is La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000) by Peter Watkins. The film was released in the inception of the second golden age of the television and that is the reason why we should consider it a precedent, rather than a full member of the category. The film is a docudrama that re-enact the Utopian experience of the people of Paris with a vast cast mainly formed by non-professional actors. Its experimental condition situates the film in the boundary between fiction, documentary and avant-garde film. Due to its experimentation and hybrid nature, the product was not apt for conventional television, and that's why it was financed by the Franco-German TV channel ARTE. Experimental Films Under the epigraph of long experimental films, Andy Warhol deserves an special mention. In 1963 the artist made a film consisting of a 5 hours 20 minutes fixed shot of his friend John Giorno sleeping. Sleep was the first experiment of his series of slow movies, which Warhol called anti-films. The year after, he shot, together with Jonas Mekas, an 8-hour long view of the Empire State Building from dawn to dusk. Category:Film Category:TV Series Category:TV Category:TV Shows Category:Cinema Category:Film History Category:Experimental Category:Documentaty Category:Avant-Garde